NUTS: territorial division of EU

Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics

There are 97 NUTS units in Poland since 1 January 2018:

NUTS 1 –- macroregions (grouping voivodships) – 7 units

NUTS 2 –- regions (voivodships or parts of a voivodship) –- 17 units

NUTS 3 –- subregions (grouping powiats) – 73 units

TERYT: territorial division of Poland

There are 16 provinces,

380 counties and

2750 communities in Poland.

As population in Poland is 38,5 mln and the area equals 312,7 sq kilometers (120 persons per 1 sqkm) on the average each powiat has 820 sqkm and each community has 113.5 sqkm or approximately 100 thousand persons per “powiat and 14 thousand per”gmina".

Province in Polish is “prowincja” (due to both are from Latin) but actually Polish administrative provice is called województwo, from wodzić – ie commanding (the armed troops in this context).
This is an old term/custom from the 14th century, where Poland was divided into provinces (every province ruled by a wojewoda ie chief of that province). More can be found at Wikipedia (cf Administrative divisions of Poland)

A Polish county called powiat is 2-nd level administrative unit. In ancient Poland powiat was called starostwo and the head of a starostwo was called starosta. “Stary” means Old, so “starosta” is an old (and thus wise) person. BTW the head of powiat is “starosta” as 600 years ago:-)

TERYT is an official register of the territorial division of Poland It is complex system which includes identification of administrative units. Every unit has (up to) a 7-digit id number: wwppggt where ww = “województwo” id, pp = “powiat” id, gg = “gmina” id and “t” decodes type-of-community (rural, municipal or mixed). Higher units has trailing zeros for irrelevant part of id, so 14 or 1400000 means the same; as well as 1205 and 1205000. Six numbers is enough to identify a community (approx 2750 units).